13 Signs You’re Dating a Guy With A Controlling Mom

image - Flickr / Bilal Kamoon
image – Flickr / Bilal Kamoon

A guy who respects women is usually the product of a loving mother, and my mom has always said that it’s easy to tell if a guy has been raised with maternal cuddles and kisses. There’s much to be said for family orientated fellas, and men who are good sons to their moms will likely be just as devoted to his special someone.

But there’s also something to be said for boundaries and healthy distance. My experience of dating guys with controlling mothers, or should I say, mothers who are robustly woven into the daily operations of their sons lives that even he feels codependent, is that it can start feeling like there are three people in the relationship (as Princess Diana once said of Charles and Camilla). And his controlling mother’s attitude towards you, the girlfriend, will be unquestionable significant. She’ll either reject you (no one is good enough for her son), OR she’ll swoop you up and smother you with almost as much adulation as she offers her boy. Either way, you’ll have your work cut out for you, and it’s good to be aware of what you’re entering before you’re in too deep.


1. It’s night time, you’re watching a movie or driving somewhere together, and you notice that he’s incessantly responding to texts. You ask who it is, and surprise surprise—its his MOM.

2. Within only a few months of dating, you’re friends with his mom on Facebook, she has your cell phone number and texts you personally to arrange social commitments.

3. You see your social calendar becoming consumed by dinners and lunches with his mom.

4. He’s tagged in at least every second of his mom’s Facebook posts.

5. You had a fight (a mild relationship crisis), and you find out after the fact that he told his mom everything. Every. Ugly. Detail.

6. Rather than being upfront with his mom about how he (we) might not want to schedule in social events with her ever second day of the week (that we might want a Saturday night to ourselves from time to time), he’ll simply ignore her. ‘Cos he’s… scaaaared of her….

7. You’ve been at dinner or in a movie, and when you go to leave he checks his phone and finds three three minute-long voicemail messages from his mom.

8. He and his mom share more friends than can be counted on one hand.

9. His mom has a tendency to try and incorporate him into her line of work: If she’s a business woman, she’ll try to get him to go into business with her, or train him up to work for her company; if she’s a creative type, the chances are he is too, and its a sure bet that he’ll be working on her film sets, or in her art studio, or that she’ll arrange for them to co-exhibit their work at the same gallery or theatre.

10. She’s as ambitious about his career as he is (if not more), and she’ll routinely line up lunches for him (of which she’ll of course be in attendance) with prospective “good contacts”.

11. You’re in a disagreement with him about something and he starts regurgitating an opinion that you heard expressed almost verbatim by his mother at dinner only a few nights ago.

12. When shit hits the fan; he has financial problems, he’s lost a job, was pulled over by the police and given a large fine, or you had a horrible fight, his knee-jerk reaction is to go running to mommy.

13. His mom still does his laundry. And likes it. Thought Catalog Logo Mark

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